31–40 of 179 posts
Markdown is popular because it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s easy and free and portable.
I know html very well, I use markdown because it’s faster to take notes or make simple posts. Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes and they can be productive editing headers and bullets and text.
That's not the fault of Markdown and not part of Markdown at all. Markdown doesn't say anything about metadata. Use of YAML at the top of Markdown documents was invented elsewhere (Jekyll, I believe), and any tools can use whatever they like.
> Numbered lists. Again, you need to use an editor to stay sane.
Or you can just type 1. in front of every line and let the Markdown renderer take care of numbering.
> What the hell are task lists anyways? Why do they exist?
Again, not a standard Markdown feature. They are a GitHub invention for adding checkboxes to issues and tracking the progress of things. They're convenient for places like GitHub, but if you're writing some documentation, you can just ignore them.
> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc.
YAGNI. And many of those would not necessarily be part of the Markdown document - in a blog, the would be outside of Markdown and instead part of the main template (which is by necessity HTMLish).
> Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all.
Why not? I can just copy-paste the embed widget from YouTube and paste it in my Markdown. The (Gruber) spec allows HTML inside Markdown. A thing that knows how to turn a link to the social-media-site-du-jour into a nice widget is outside the scope of a simple markup language (it would need a large database and constant updates).
Saying that Markdown is bad is really naive. There are not many ways to specify formatting without it getting in the way of your writing. Markdown is popular because it strikes the right balance where reading a markdown document requires a lot less visual strain compared to the same HTML document. It requires the least amount of letters to specify formatting - italics is 2 chars, bold is 4 chars, underline is 2 chars etc. Lists are mostly inferred and require no additional formatting. Compare that to HTML which requires 5+n chars (where n is the number of chars in the tag name) regardless of which format you want to use.
Markdown does have it's quirks but they don't come up 99% of the time unless finding them is specifically your intention. Knowing whether *__hello__* is bold italic or italic bold is not important unless you are writing a parser.
The downsides of Markdown are much, much less than the downsides of HTML. Writing is not the same as designing a website or a UI. It's not meant to be pretty and typesetting + styling should not be the concern of writers.
>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a…
> Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.
You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.
Thanks for stopping by, but no thanks.
> Markdown will never get beyond developers. Not only is this probably incorrect; but even if it were the case, then: - so what? - doesn't this contradict the title lamenting the popularity of markdown?
But at the same time accept that these are potentially time consuming and complicated to do by hand or even with tools.
Markdown and likes are for the case of fast and minimal styling, while still being human readable and writable. Which is very reasonable trade-off. And I will take it every day.
Don't try to force something like tags for writing as that would be just horrid.
The author is mixing up two different things: the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) and the existing specification of Markdown-with-a-capital-M (and its flow on effects). The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way…
There is a trade off here though. When people sit down to write something that doesn't have weird edge cases they're not likely to end up with a lightweight markup like Markdown.
So simultaneously the spec may be a complete disaster and a contributing factor Markdown's success. Much like how the human brain is very bad at adding numbers together and has so far effortlessly out-competed alternative species that had brains that were great at numbers but not vision processing (being great at adding numbers is so useless for an animal I assume the skill never evolved, but imagine there was a creature somewhere with amazing additive powers for the sake of argument).
Having an unambiguous spec could theoretically be a disadvantage to adoption outside of a very carefully designed markup.
I like Markdown for self-contained one page documents with basic formatting - reddit comments, README.md etc. For anything more it's just inadequate.
>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a…
> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. > Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. You repeat this point but the trend of markdown…